It can produce a strong yellow dye, although it is rarely used for this purpose. The main use of the mamoncillo is its sweet fruits, which are consumed fresh or canned, and can also be used in the preparation of soft drinks and alcoholic beverages. The seed, being slippery, is a potential choking hazard.įruits mature in the dry season or summer. They are extremely rich in iron and phosphorus.
When ripe, the fruits have a bittersweet, wine-like flavour and have mild laxative properties. There are efforts in Puerto Rico and Florida to produce cultivars with a more favourable flesh-to-seed ratio. The bulk of the fruit is made up of the one (or, rarely, two) whitish seeds, which are surrounded by an edible, orange, juicy, gelatinous pulp. The fruit is a round drupe, approximately 2–4 cm (0.79–1.57 in) in diameter, with a thin, brittle, green peel. Their pulp is orange, salmon or yellowish in color with a somewhat juicy and pasty texture. They are typically dioecious plants, however autogamous trees occur from time to time.įlowers have four petals and eight stamens and produce void, green drupes which are 2.5–4 cm (0.98–1.57 in) long and 2 cm (0.79 in) wide. Trees can reach heights of up to 25 m (82 ft) and come with alternate, compound leaves. The fruit ripens during the warm summer months. This fruit, known as quenepa in Puerto Rico, grows particularly abundantly in the municipality of Ponce, and there is a yearly celebration in that municipality known as Festival Nacional de la Quenepa (National Genip Fruit Festival). It is believed to have been introduced into the Caribbean in pre-Columbian times and is also found in India. Melicoccus bijugatus is native to northern South America and naturalised in coastal and dry forest in Central America, the Caribbean and parts of the Old World tropics. The specific epithet bijugatus refers to the bijugate leaves, leaves which consist of two pairs of leaflets.Ī man selling bundles of Quenepas in Ponce, Puerto Rico In his monograph on the Neotropical members of the tribe ( Talisia and Melicoccus) Pedro Acevedo-Rodríguez suggested that although Talisia and Melicoccus appeared to form a monophyletic group, the other (Old World) genera probably did not belong to the same lineage. In 1888 German taxonomist Ludwig Radlkofer placed Melicoccus in the tribe Melicocceae together with eight other genera. A proposal was made in 1994 to conserve Melicocca over Melicoccus, but the proposal was rejected, leading to a restoration of the original version of the name. Over the next two centuries, Linnaeus' spelling variation was used in almost all publications. In 1762 Linnaeus used a spelling variation of the name Melicocca bijuga. In 1760, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin described the first species in Browne's genus, which he named M. bijugatus trees which were cultivated in Puerto Rico. The genus Melicoccus was first described by Patrick Browne, an Irish physician and botanist, in 1756. Phylogeny of Melicoccus based on morphological traits, showing the placement of M.